The Future of Online Shopping Is Offline

This is something of a mantra for me: online shopping is ultimately about offline/local transactions. Those in the retail segment prefer to call this “multi-channel marketing.” Regardless, the future is about telling people where they can buy things in the local market. E-commerce has a recurring bit part in my movie about shopping’s future but it remains small despite some good reviews.

comScore glessfully reported ecommerce revenues of $102 billion (not counting travel) for 2006. According to the company that represented 26% growth over 2005.

Don’t get me wrong (as they say), $100 billion is a very impressive large number. But, to put it in perspective, ecommerce is no more than about 3% (or so — Forrester argues more) of US retail. And get this, Jupiter says in its forecast that ecommerce is “maturing” and will slow.

These are direct navigation queries for “online retailers.” Or are they? While all these companies sell online, eBay and Amazon are the only two true “online retailers.” All these other names are well-known retail brands where the overwhelming majority of purchases happen in local stores.

And what’s the most popular area of most brand retailer websites? You guessed it: the store locator.

There are a growing number of sites seeking to provide local inventory information (or its equivalent):

ShopLocal

Yokel

NearbyNow

StepUp

CNet (via Channel Intelligence)

Become.com (in a limited way)

Google (via Froogle and partnerships)

Yahoo! (soon?)

Others (yet to launch)

More and more offline purchasing is influenced by online research and advertising. This is the dominant paradigm. True, consumer purchase behavior is become more complex but it’s clear to me where things are going . . .

The only question is how do publishers and site operators respond?

Source: MORI Research for the NAA (2006) n=4,020 US adults

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This entry was posted on January 19, 2007 at 5:38 pm and is filed under Online shopping, Shopping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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